


If You Meet King George's Men (But Not The Song, Coda #5)

by emilyray (emilyenrose), ignipes



Series: But Not The Song [6]
Category: Bandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-27
Updated: 2008-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-16 02:09:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyenrose/pseuds/emilyray, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,<br/>You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.<br/>If they call you 'pretty maid' and chuck you 'neath the chin,<br/>Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been!</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Meet King George's Men (But Not The Song, Coda #5)

_  
**If You Meet King George's Men (But Not The Song, Coda #5)**   
_   
[Story Index and Warnings](http://community.livejournal.com/shacklesnchains/446.html)

 ** _If You Meet King George's Men_**  
_

 _If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,  
You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.  
If they call you 'pretty maid' and chuck you 'neath the chin,  
Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been!_

 _\- from 'A Smuggler's Song' by Rudyard Kipling_  
_

The posters are folded up into squares and tucked underneath a leather-bound ledger on an old writing desk in the corner. Alicia finds them after only a few minutes of searching. She sits down in the kitchen and unfolds the tattered pages, smoothing them side by side onto the tabletop. _Wanted_ , they say. The words are identical on both, only the names different. _Dangerous fugitive. Conspiracy against the crown. Walker. Conrad._

The word _reward_ is added unassumingly at the bottom, but it's the value below it that catches the eye. It's a lot of money. It's not the kind of money that says _thief_ or _pirate_ or _smuggler_. It's the kind of money that says _traitor_ or _spy_ or _murderer_.

The likenesses aren't very good ones. The artist had obviously never seen either man. But they're good enough.

The cottage door bangs open, and Alicia looks up as Jamia comes in. It's looks like she's been cleaning out the forge; her hands and face are smeared black with soot.

"Sure," Jamia says by way of greeting. "Come on in, make yourself at home."

"The door was unlocked," says Alicia.

"No it wasn't."

"It was after I picked it."

Jamia huffs a quick laugh but her amused expression doesn't last long. She looks tired. She sits down in the other chair, barely glancing at the posters on the table. "Any news?"

"Officially, the good sheriff and his merry men have vowed to step up patrols on the border, make sure no more dangerous slave-traders find their way into his county."

"Unofficially?"

Alicia tips her chair back on two legs and balances for a few moments. "If there's slave trading to be done, he wants in on it."

Jamia snorts. "Big surprise there. He suspect anything?"

"You mean, did he buy Way's story?" Alicia waits, but Jamia only raises an eyebrow. "Hook, line and sinker."

"Can't say I blame him," Jamia says. She sits forward and rests her elbow on the table. "If you'd asked me a couple months ago if Lord Way was capable of conspiring to do anything except find the bottom of a bottle of whiskey, I would have laughed in your face."

Alicia shrugs. "People aren't always what they look like. People don't stay what they look like. Look at us."

"Yeah," says Jamia. "Look at us." She looks down at the posters on the table, and a twisty expression flits across her face. "Fuck." She crumples them up and pushes them away. "We're all dead if we get caught doing this, do you realize?"

"We were always dead if we got caught," says Alicia. "You knew that."

"I knew," says Jamia. "I mean - maybe I didn't _know_."

"What's wrong?"

Jamia sighs and puts her head in her hands. "I keep thinking about all those kids," she says, muffled. "Down at the Davis place. All those _kids_ , and we weren't going to do a thing."

Alicia thinks about the kids, their thin sharp faces and knobbly elbows, their wide eyes when she let them out of the cages, two by two. They'd all been paired up. She'd handed them knives, good solid knives from the stash she keeps under her bed. (Jamia makes them for her every time she has the metal and the spare time. Alicia likes Jamia for a lot of reasons.)

She thinks about the adult gladiators too, all vanished now except for the two up at the Way manor. She'd nodded to each of them and they'd nodded back. Some of them probably guessed. Alicia's still got traces of the training left in the way she moves. She uses it. She uses everything. There's a tattoo of a rosebud on her right arm that Jamia has never seen and doesn't know exists.

"Those poor _boys_ ," says Jamia again, and Alicia glances up. Jamia's not paying attention. She's looking at the crumpled-up posters, and she's not talking about the gladiator kids anymore. "I think I did a shitty thing," Jamia says. "Alicia - I think I -"

"Hush," says Alicia, and leans over to give her a hug. Jamia clings to her. "We do what we do," Alicia says. "We were in danger. They were a threat."

"But they _weren't_ ," says Jamia into Alicia's shoulder. "I keep trying to think, some way I could have known, but I just - I panicked, and now..."

She's interrupted by a knock on the door. They look at each other for a moment, then Jamia sighs, pulls away from the hug, stands to answer it. It's Mr. Gifford, the farrier. He steps awkwardly in when Jamia stands aside. "Miss Nestor, Miss Simmons," he says, nodding at each of them. He twists his cap in his hands and hunches his shoulders self-consciously "Nice evening."

"It is," Jamia says. She sounds pleasant enough, but Alicia can see the tightening in her shoulders and the rigid set to her jaw. "What brings you by, Paul?"

He glances nervously at Alicia. She looks back at him steadily and makes no move to get up.

Jamia sighs. "Have a seat?"

Gifford shakes his head. "No thanks, miss. I won't be long. I only wanted - I thought you should know, the sheriff was by my place today." He looks a little awed, as though he can't quite believe such a powerful man would lower himself to visiting an unimportant farrier's shop. "He was asking questions about... about that incident."

 _Incident_ , that's what everyone has taken to calling it. Probably because it sounds better than _massacre_. Alicia keeps quiet, lets Jamia ask, "What did he want to know?"

"Oh, just..." Gifford tightens his grip on his hat and looks around the room. "He wanted to know if there was any suspicious behavior. Around here, and the like. I didn't tell him anything," he adds quickly, urgently. "I swear, Miss Nestor, I didn't tell him a thing."

"I know you didn't," Jamia says. "It's okay, Paul. The sheriff is suspicious, but he doesn't know anything."

Gifford nods, but he looks far from convinced. "And the heir...?"

Eight months Lady Helena's been gone, and her people still speak of her as the lady, respect and love in their voices, and Gerard as the undeserving heir. Some of them, Alicia thinks, will probably never get out of the habit.

Jamia glances at Alicia before answering. "Lord Way won't be a problem for us either."

Gifford snorts derisively. " _Him_. Always knew he was no good, no matter how much the lady loved him. Buying slaves, and on this side of the border too. Why doesn't he move over to one of the slave provinces if he wants that? Leave us in peace." Gifford looks like he's just barely restraining himself from spitting on Jamia's floor.

"He set them free," Alicia says. The rumors are already running rampant and won't be stopped, but that, at least, is something people should know. If nothing else, she doesn't think Bryar and Iero would take very kindly to being mistaken for his lordship's slaves by suspicious townspeople.

Gifford _hmphs_. "It's still trouble," he says. "We don't need that kind of trouble around here. There are laws." Jamia raises an eyebrow, and Gifford smiles a little and ducks his head. "Well. Other laws. Tax laws, those don't count."

Jamia smiles too, but it looks a little strained. "I know it's trouble," she says patiently. She sounds like she's been saying this same thing over and over again, to every worried person who stops by her shop or home. "But we'll handle it, okay?"

Gifford bobs his head. "I know you will, Miss Nestor. You always - your daddy taught you well, how to take care of people. I know there's some that say it's not right, a girl doing what you do, but there's a lot of people around here who wouldn't've made it through the winter without your trade."

"It's not just me," says Jamia, and that's another thing it sounds like she's repeated too many times, too many ways, until the words have lost their meaning. "We're all in this together."

"Yeah, well, some of us," Gifford says. He hesitates and looks a bit uncertain before he goes on. "Is there any - any news? About the usual - it's just, it's May now, time for planting, and my boy's farm..." He turns away, as though he's ashamed to be asking.

And that, Alicia thinks, is what it always comes back to. It was a long, hard winter following a summer of floods and failed crops, and nobody expected the spring traders to show up smuggling slaves rather than untaxed grain seed. One summer, two at a stretch, that's what most of the farmers around here can make it through in thin years, without help.

"We're working on it," Jamia says, her voice quiet. "But I don't know... the plague hit the other side of the mountains hard. I don't know that most people have enough to feed themselves, much less enough to sell."

Gifford looks sad, but he nods slowly, understanding. "Times are hard," he says. Then his wrinkled face brightens into a smile. "But they'll get better. They always do."

He bids them goodnight and leaves, shutting the door carefully behind him.

Jamia exhales slowly. "Fuck."

"Nothing we can do about that," Alicia says. "And we're doing a hell of lot better here than people are in other places."

"I know. I know, but..."

"How's that feel, anyway?"

Jamia frowns in confusion. "How's what feel?"

"Carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders."

For a second Jamia looks angry, but the anger slips away and she sticks her tongue out. "It's just - I didn't sign up for this. _We_ didn't sign up for this. Goods across the border, that's what we said, food and cloth and wood and metal, goods across the border. People need to _live_."

 _People need to live._ That's what Helena used to say.

"No one's ever died because of me before," Jamia adds quietly, turning away.

Alicia thinks about hugging her again. There's soot all over both of them now anyway. But Jamia's shoulders are stiff, like she'd shy away. "It wasn't because of you," Alicia says instead. "You didn't pick up the gun. You didn't pull the trigger. We didn't know."

"Oh, come on, Alicia. I might as well have sold them to the slavers," says Jamia. "I knew - I knew damn well we were handing them over to die. They were fugitives -"

"We went to rescue them," says Alicia.

"We went _too late_."

And there's nothing Alicia can say to that.

"That poor boy," Jamia whispers again. "God, if I could just go back."

"You can't," says Alicia bluntly.

"We didn't know," says Jamia. "We couldn't have known." She runs her dirty hands through her hair. She sounds like she's trying to convince herself.

"Of course we couldn't have known," says Alicia. "They know that. It's one of the dangers of being a _secret_ conspiracy of do-gooders, people not knowing. They didn't know about us either."

"I don't feel like much of a do-gooder lately."

"There are twenty-five teenagers in that manor who would be on their way to the city markets right now."

Jamia shakes her head. "There's a fresh grave and a pile of ash where the Davis farm used to be."

There's a pause.

"You're hard on yourself," says Alicia eventually.

"It's the truth." Jamia sighs and sits back down at the table. "You know, I thought - I was angry when Helena died. For a lot of reasons, but not least because we all knew that her grandsons were getting the place, and we all knew - you weren't here when the older one still lived here, were you?"

Alicia shakes her head.

"He used to live in three rooms in the east wing. And... poor Helena loved him so much, and all he'd do was sit there drinking himself stupid. Sometimes he'd come out and stumble around the village for an afternoon, and all the time the biggest smuggling operation on the border was storing half its goods in the attics above his head and he never noticed a thing." Jamia snorts. "He was a joke. And then to replace her ladyship with _that_ -"

"Doesn't sound much like him," says Alicia. She's watched the Way brothers, this last week. Both of them.

(She's caught the younger one watching her. That doesn't often happen. People don't usually see Alicia when she doesn't mean to be seen.)

"No, it doesn't, does it?" says Jamia. "He comes back from the city and now _this_. And she would have loved it. She was the one who made the rules at the beginning, you know. She was the one who said we'd never deal with slavers. And look what we did, we -" She makes an angry noise. "We were her legacy, I thought. And _look what we did._ "

Alicia touches her shoulder. "It's been a bad year." It has.

Jamia shakes her head again. "Have you seen Lyn? Has she left already?" Lyn and her people are supposed to be taking a string of horses across the border this week, over the mountains where the border guards all know her and down to the big ranch twenty miles north of here. There are people there waiting to buy the horses, and other people waiting to hide the things in their packs.

She hasn't left yet, though. Alicia knows Lyn doesn't want to leave when things are in this much of a mess. "She's gone to the manor," she says. "She went to talk things over with them. Routes. Patrols." Blame. Truces. "That kind of thing. We need to work together."

"At this hour?"

"The Ways are night owls."

Jamia bites her lip. It's pretty obvious what she's thinking. Normally Jamia's the one who hammers out alliances and agreements. "I should have - I should have thought of that, shouldn't I."

"You aren't actually the leader, you know," Alicia says. "We don't have one."

"I just want to do something," says Jamia. "I just want to - People need to live."

"People need to live," Alicia agrees softly. She knows what Jamia means. "You should go next time."

"Oh, sure," Jamia agrees bitterly. "Hello, Jamia. Here are the lords you underestimated, here are the kids you didn't think of rescuing, here are the conspirators who hate your guts, here's the man whose best friend you killed -"

"You've never killed anyone," says Alicia sharply.

Jamia looks up at her, her eyes wide and surprised.

"Take it from me," Alicia says. "You never have. The man who killed Conrad is dead."

"You -"

 _"I told you, I told you when we found the other fucker missing - I told you we should have killed them both, I told you this was fishy -"_

 _"How did they get knives? How the fuck did they get knives?"_

 _Leaves crunching under their feet. They weren't even bothering to be quiet. Alicia stepped back into the shadows of the forest._

 _"Should have killed 'em both," muttered the first man wildly. "Should have killed 'em both. I told you."_

 _His friend made a soft sound as the knife went in. He didn't notice. "...fucking mouth that one had," he mumbled. "Shouldn't talk about my mother like that. Should have killed 'em."_

 _Alicia stepped forward and tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around with panic in his eyes and the second knife slid smoothly across his throat, blood dripping down and soaking into the underbrush._

"He's dead," says Alicia. "Trust me."

Jamia looks down at the tabletop. "Sorry," she murmurs.

They're quiet for a minute. Jamia looks at her sooty hands and makes a face. "I need a bath," she says.

Alicia ignores it. "You should go instead of Lyn," she says. "To the manor, next time. Sorting things out, getting things done, that's what you're good at. That's why Paul Gifford comes here when he's afraid."

"I - but I can't do anything," says Jamia. "I can't change the weather or the laws or stop the plague, I can't turn the clocks back, I can't make food appear when there isn't any. I can't make _jobs_ appear when all the plantations run on the backs of slaves. I can't -"

"We aren't expecting you to," Alicia says.

Jamia sighs and buries her face in her hands. "It was so much easier to do this when we had Helena's resources to count on," she mumbles. "This is _hard work_."

"They're Way's resources now," says Alicia. "But I get the impression he might be on our side." She hesitates. "If we explain."

"We don't talk to strangers."

That was one of Helena's rules too. They don't trade in slaves and they don't talk to strangers. They don't take risks. They don't hurt anyone and they don't get hurt. The only laws they're breaking are tax laws, and it feels like there's a line between that and actual crime, even if the judges wouldn't make any distinctions. They're just trying to help.

 _We don't talk to strangers._ That was what Alicia had been thinking the evening the two young men walked into the village square and looked around until they found the forge. She'd watched them closely, fixing their features in her head, before she walked to the noticeboard in the inn where the wanted posters were nailed up and checked.

She'd ripped the posters down and waited outside the forge for Jamia to spot her, to say, "Excuse me," to the strangers and come and ask, "Alicia, what?"

Alicia shakes her head, shaking the image of the past away. Done is done. If there's one thing she's learned over the years, it's that you can never, ever go back. Only forwards.

"Maybe it's time we started," she says. "I think we're all on the same side."


End file.
